It’s April 24 and the Minnesota Twins have played 21 games
during the 2019 Major League Baseball season. In that time, left fielder Eddie
Rosario has taken the American League by storm being a co-owner of the home run
lead, and he’s spearheading an offensive outburst not generally seen around
these parts. It wasn’t long ago that Rosario looked the part of an All Star,
but where is all of this coming from?
Through 21 games, Rosario has already tallied ten dingers on
the season. That puts him on pace for over 70 on the season, and it’s the
fastest any player in Twins history has ever reached double-digits. When you’ve
got that much power production this quickly it becomes hard to fly under the
radar. At the 2018 All Star break Twins fans saw Rosario own a .311/.353/.537
slash line with 19 homers however, and that story didn’t have an entirely great
ending. Figuring out how this may be different is key for the continued success
of the budding star.
After racing out to gaudy numbers in 2018, Rosario finished
the season owning just a .622 OPS in his final 45 games and sending another
five balls out of the park. His year ended in the middle of September and the
tale of the first half seemed like a distant memory. Fast forward to today and
we’re once again in the midst of a hot start. The .274/.315/.679 slash line is
a pretty one, but there’s a couple of inputs to the batted ball profile that
should make us smile.
As a free swing who tends to expand the zone, and rarely
take walks, we need to view Rosario’s approach through a different lens. He’s
chased 42% of the time in 2019 and whiffed on 11% of pitches. Neither of those occurrences
are beyond career norms, and his 79% contact rate is a new high. When making
contact in the zone, he’s doing so at nearly 90%, essentially daring opponents
to throw strikes. It isn’t where he’s swinging though, as much as it is how he’s
making contact.
On the season Rosario owns a career best 39.7% hard hit
rate. This is a 3% improvement from 2018 and is a 7% jump from his career
average. On batted balls, only 39% are being hit on the ground with 50% being
fly balls and 10.3% being line drives. Elevating the ball is certainly a
positive trend, and it’s a direct reflection of a significant launch angle
increase. On base hits during 2018, Rosario had an average launch angle of just
13.5 degrees. This season, that number is all the way up to 22.3 degrees.
From a spray perspective, you could call Rosie the left
handed Brian Dozier. All the way up to a 52.9% pull rate, all but one of Eddie’s
home runs have been hit to the right side of centerfield. The concentration on
power was strong that way in 2018 as well, but the final pull percentage landed
at 43.4%. This isn’t to say that Rosario won’t find success going the other way
as pitcher’s attack him more on the outside. What we can see immediately is
that Eddie is putting strong swings on balls he can yank to his strong side.
For now, we’re dealing with a small sample size. Knowing how
much action is left this season, we’ll have plenty of time for this to all
normalize. The early season power surge is reflective of a guy getting more
loft while hitting the ball significantly harder. That’s a straightforward path
to these types of results, but it’s comforting to note that the results aren’t
coming with the caveat of an approach that has changed in any negative or impactful
way.
Lost in all this offensive narrative is that Rosario has
regained a focus in the outfield that rounds himself into something special.
Putting up six defensive runs saved through his first 165 innings, and notching
four outfield assists in the early going, he’s again a guy you don’t want to
test in the grass either.
I’d be willing to bet any sum of money that Rosario won’t
wind up with 70 home runs in 2019. He’s not going to hit 10 every 20 games, and
there will be a month or weeks in which he experiences a real slump. For a guy
that looked to display his absolute ceiling a season ago however, it’s
comforting to see that even if that may be the height of things, the floor is a
pretty darn good player as well.
